To design a task-independent dialogue system, we present a task-oriented dialogue analysis in terms of finding the referents of definite descriptions and we show how this analysis leads to a goal-oriented inferential representation of the task. This representation provides a logical generic model of the task, which is compatible with a belief system. Then, we show how this task model, jointly used with the domain-specific user model for which we propose a formalization, enables a dialogue system to plan request negotiation dialogues.
M. David Sadek